NICK MARTIN of SLEEPING WITH SIRENS: Geeking Out On Music
An interview by Sarah Kidd.
When Sleeping with Sirens first emerged on the scene with their debut album With Ears To See And Eyes To Hear in 2010, they immediately made their mark with their high octane live performances. Soon amassing a legion of fans the five piece quickly followed it up with their sophomore release Let’s Cheers To This; cementing their place with breakout single ‘If You Can’t Hang’.
With lead singer Kellin Quinn at the helm the band has completed something of a metamorphosis through their last three albums, their latest ‘Gossip’ released in September of last year seeing the band take a completely different direction; embracing a more pop based sound rather than their traditional post-hardcore one. But with line-up changes that have resulted in a collection of musicians with a wide and varied taste in music, the evolution of their sound was inevitable. This evolution, in the eyes of guitarist Nick Martin is a good thing and as a collective Sleeping with Sirens have embraced this growth in their sound.
When I catch up with Nick he divulges that he is “hanging out in San Diego enjoying the sun” and as I look out the window at yet another chilly overcast day in Auckland, I can’t help but feel a small pang of jealously…
Let’s quickly talk about your background; you started playing guitar at quite an early age, besides the influence from your father, what inspired you to first pick up guitar?
“I grew up in like an MTV generation, so I grew up in the generation where there was music videos on all the time! I grew up on like Nirvana and Stone Temple Pilots, Green Day and Silverchair and all these bands that just made me want to just be an artist you know?
I grew up with a lot of music in my household with my father, but it was actually seeing it on TV and just being in that stage of my life of being an angsty kid and music just speaking volumes to me that I just knew at that point that’s what I wanted to do, I needed to do. I felt like if I tried to do anything else, somehow, someway music I always gravitated back towards that no matter what!”
You have played in several bands including Underminded, Cinematic Sunrise and D.R.U.G.S. But since 2004 you have been a permanent member of Sleeping with Sirens. You’re coming up five years with the band; do you feel like you have now found your place in many ways? That this is where you are at home now?
“Absolutely! It’s crazy that you just said ‘coming up five years’ I’d like completely lost track of time that it has even been five years! Yeah, I definitely found my place, it took a couple of years for me to integrate with the band; when I first came on with the band I was just a hired gun you know? Just hired to come on tour and that was it.
But then I progressively started playing a bigger role in decision making as far as business things went and I started integrating myself a lot more. That just came about from being in so many bands beforehand and just having a lot of years under my belt of being in the music industry and I think they respected and trusted me which got me to where I am now with them and I feel like I definitely fit.
They always say to me that I am like the Dad of the band [laughs] you know I’m the responsible guy that goes to bed early at night and I watch what I eat, and I watch how much I drink; I’m just a total Dad. So I think they liked having that balance put into the band a few years back, I think it’s kinda helped them a lot, see I’m a bit older than everybody else as well so I kinda brought this old man wisdom with me to the band that I definitely think has helped. So yeah it’s awesome to have found my place with the band. It’s been an amazing journey with them so far and I’m a very fortunate and humble individual because of that.”
As you said you were originally taken on as a hired gun; what first attracted you to working with Sleeping with Sirens?
“It’s weird because I didn’t actually know that much about the band at the time, I had met some of the guys years before that and I had met Kellin and their tour manager – who’s still our tour manager – used to tour manage my old band D.R.U.G.S, so that was kind of what we had in common between us, and it was just a really random stars aligning kind of situation where their guitarist at the time was having a baby and they needed somebody else.
I hadn’t actually played music or played guitar for a couple of years, I had given it up for a while and Sleeping with Sirens kind of inadvertently got me back into music again, like my passion I’d lost that. It was a phone call from Kellin one day saying ‘Hey man we need somebody last minute to come to Europe, we would love to have you, like let’s do it!’ So I said ‘I’ll do it!’ you know it’s a paid vacation, I don’t know the music but I can learn it and I ended up becoming a big fan of theirs. I was listening to their records, having to learn their songs and going ‘Damn, why did I sleep on this band for so long’ because they were so good. So it was really cool getting into a new band and then also being able to play guitar with them, tour with them and make the music with them. It’s awesome how all that worked out for all of us and like I said I’m very fortunate how things kind of aligned out of nowhere!”
Indeed! Especially as they reignited your passion for music!
“They did yeah!”
Now guitar wise, on the ‘Madness’ album you used Les Paul’s and a couple of customs; did you go the same with your latest album Gossip?
“Yeah with Gossip, we used even more guitars. We used a lot of Les Pauls, we used a lot of Gibson’s, but we used Ernie Balls as well – we used these beautiful guitars, a stingray and a cutlass and we used them on the album as well.
But for the most part it’s just a lot of Les Pauls, it’s kind of a tried and true sound for us on albums and our producer is a really big fan of them and I love using them. We didn’t use the exact same guitars we used on Madness, but we used similar models. We were in Nashville and I got to use this old acoustic Gibson guitar that Lou Reed had played on and all these amazing guitar players had played on and so I was playing the most beautiful acoustic guitar that I have ever played in my life, and we used that as well. So yeah a lot of Gibson’s a lot of Ernie Ball’s.”
Speaking of the producer, Gossip was produced by David Bendeth who of course has some pretty big bands under his belt; Paramore, All Time Low – how did you find the experience of working with him? What did he bring to the table for you personally?
“What’s great about him is that him and I really, really connected on just music history. I think he was just very surprised by my kind of musical knowledge as far back to Motown, R & B, old rock music and you know punk rock music; he was very surprised about how much I knew about that so it was always really cool being able to talk to each other on a different level in the studio as far as ‘Let’s go for a guitar tune and’ I’m like ‘What are you feeling?’ If he said ‘Let’s go for some of The Clash from their second record ‘ I would go ‘I know exactly what you’re talking about!’, and we can both really get on the same page and pull from inspirations that we both love. And you know it was just fun working with him and it was fun everyday when I would get in the studio we would watch old YouTube interviews with Miles Davis and get inspired by his real quirky attitude and how he was able to present that through his music.”
Miles Davis was indeed an inspirational man!
“It just made the recording process so much fun, being able to just geek out on music stuff with him, I think that’s something that I really cherish working with David Bendeth. It’s always fun talking about stories with him; it’s just things that no one else would understand. As far as where the music goes and having that friendship with him it meant a lot to me and it was a lot of fun.”
Since Gossip was released there has been much talk that Sleeping with Sirens have stepped away from their post-hardcore roots and have moved down a more pop influenced path; would you agree with that?
“It’s only after an album is done where I can see from an outside perspective as to what we’ve created and maybe what our previous album sounded like vs what we currently put out and work on. You know when we go into the studio and we start writing we don’t really have any pre-conceived notions or ideas as far as like ‘This album is gonna sound just like this and we’re gonna make songs that sound like this’, it’s really about wherever we are in our lives at that time that dictates what the sound of our album is.
The beauty of our band is that everyone in our band listens to so many different types of music; you know our drummer listens to a lot of hip-hop music and Jack our guitar player listens to a lot of like rock and country music and I listen to a lot of old rock music, but I also listen to mariachi and punk rock music. Kellin loves Fleetwood Mac and Justin loves Journey and 80’s; so you know we have so many different styles of music that we love that when we all get together and start working there’s a lot of different ideas and a lot of inspirations that we pull from.”
That is certainly a hugely varied range of genres!
“When we go in, whatever is inspiring us at that moment or whatever Kellin is going through emotionally that he is conveying through his lyrics, we do what we can to capture the essence of that in whatever way that we can. So if it comes out as a pop song, it comes out as a pop song. If it comes out as a rock song then that’s how it comes out. It’s never like a predetermined thing for us and you know we just started writing more new music recently and that music is very rock and it has a lot of guitars and it’s really heavy!
I think it’s an amazing thing that our band is able to cross many genres and it still maintains a Sleeping with Sirens sound; I always feel Kellins voice is like the glue that keeps the music sounding like Sleeping with Sirens always. So it just keeps it fun, it keeps it interesting for us.”
Your first single off the album Gossip was of course ‘Legends’; why that track? What statement about the album and the place that Sleeping with Sirens is in at the moment do you feel it makes?
“I think that that was one of the first songs where it really hit us hard that we had definitely crossed over into something that was different; it was a departure for the band but it was something that we still are so happy with. We just didn’t want to play it safe, this band is never gonna play it safe. We could have written an album that sounded just like our first or second albums but that doesn’t challenge us as artists.
To have a song like ‘Legends’ and have the US Olympic team pick that as their official song; having that song step beyond its own life and do its own thing before the album was even done… So that’s why we decided to go with it because it started to move without us, without us having to push it, it just started working its own magic. And you can’t really deny that! Obviously there’s a little bit of hesitance from our end thinking ‘Oh God, this is definitely a departure from our previous stuff’ but you know what do we have to lose? If we’re happy with it and that’s what we want to put out and stand behind then we’re gonna do that and so we did and we’re very proud of that.
We’re very excited with what that song has accomplished and what it’s still accomplishing. You know my Dad said the other day he was getting a drink or something and he heard the song come on; it’s just one of those songs that has a mind of its own; it’s just crossed over to so many different places and different people. And that’s the beauty of music, not knowing what’s gonna happen when you start writing and putting out songs.”
Just like no one wants to eat the same thing for dinner every night, no true fan wants to hear their favourite band just churn out the same album time and time again. Bands need to evolve and grow.
“That’s exactly it! I think that we always try to tell our older fans who maybe aren’t quite grasping our new material, ‘Just come out to the show’ For us our live show is what makes us; I guarantee if you come out to a show now and you haven’t seen us in five years you would have even more fun watching us now because our live shows really are where everything comes together with both our new material but also our old material.
We’re really good at shifting the progression of the band in a live setting; we could play “If you Can’t Hang’ and ‘If I’m James Dean, You’re Audrey Hepburn’ and heavier songs and then progressively get into ‘Legends’ through the set and it makes sense! People go ‘Oh, like I can actually hear and visually see the progression of where the band has gone’ and I think that’s just awesome. It’s an awesome thing for us to accomplish and now we don’t want to release the same stuff over and over. This album is definitely more pop based and oriented, but like I said we’re writing material now that is really heavy and sounds like very incredible material so we will weave ourselves through the creative process, but we’re still the same band.”
What’s your personal favourite track of Gossip then?
“So… uh it always changes! But probably my favourite song right now off Gossip would be ‘One Man Army’, always a fun one to play live. But you know tomorrow my favourite song might be ‘The Chase’ [laughs] every single day I feel like my favourites kind of evolve and change.”
So lastly Nick, for all of your New Zealand fans, who are very excited about your upcoming show, do you have any message?
“We’re just excited to get there! We always mention New Zealand now when we start finishing an album; you know we did this before with Madness and it happened again with Gossip – we’re like ‘I cannot wait to get back over there!’
We had so much fun when we were there last. We’re just ready to get there, it feels like it’s been ages… it’s been forever!! So we’re just excited to go over there and just have fun, meet great people, eat really good food and just have a really good fuckin’ time!”
Sleeping With Sirens are performing a special one-off show at Auckland’s Powerstation this Sunday night (29th April 2018). There are limited tickets still available from mjrpresents.com, but get in quick as they’re selling fast!
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